Atypical Adoption
by Lucillia
Summary: When's an affair not an affair? When it starts out as a Tenza of course. After a surprisingly young looking Harry Potter deals with Voldemort, events lead him to the Doctor's side and a certain Time Lord finds out that he has a preternaturally intelligent child that has about another fifty years before he hits puberty to deal with.
1. The Adoption

As Harry looked at the pictures in his photo album, he had the feeling that something was wrong, something was off, something to do with the pictures from the months leading up to his birth. First of all, there were no images of his real father who had supposedly been close to the Potters before the betrayal. He'd been told by people who had been close enough to the Potters to know that Lily had cheated on James. Sirius Black had said as much when he'd come to retrieve Pettigrew and netted Ron as well. The fact that he was unnaturally young looking for his age, unnaturally intelligent if scatterbrained and more mechanically inclined than magically inclined, seriously allergic to willow bark and anything derived from it, and had two hearts would've been proof enough of the affair even if he hadn't been told.

In his opinion, it was a pity Snape hadn't been aware of the affair, seeing as it wasn't widely publicized and his messy black hair made him look something like James Potter. Things probably would've been easier for him if he had, since Snape hated James with a passion and would've quite likely gotten a kick out of the fact that he'd been cuckolded, even if it meant that yet another man who wasn't him had gotten Lily.

As Harry flipped through the photo album, he never once noticed the fact that in the photographs taken in the month leading up to his birth Lily hadn't looked the least bit pregnant.

Tenza were good at hiding their true natures, even from themselves...

**July 29, 1980:**

He'd been drifting for ages. That was how it was for the Tenza. They were born in space and remained in hibernation, in near perpetual infancy until they reached a world where there would be someone to raise them as their own. He had made his way to such a world in an egg whose shell was as strong as the hull of a spaceship. A world where the inhabitants were kind and would probably still care for him even if they did know.

His drift slowed as he was caught in orbit around a small blue-green world which was the third planet out from a rather ordinary yellow sun. He went around once, twice, the pleas echoing in his small mind, pleas in a variety of languages, all of which were variants on the theme of "Please God, please just give us a child. One child, that's all we ask.".

He made a decision. Using the psychic powers that were endemic to his species, he sent his egg hurtling to a small island off the coast of Western Europe, though he didn't know it was called such at the time. The shell of his egg protected him from the burning heat of atmospheric entry and absorbed the shock of impact when he landed near the country home of a couple named Harrowgate, cracking open to reveal an unharmed baby Tenza who awaited his new parents for whom he would become the perfect child.

When the Harrowgates who'd rushed outside to see what the matter was touched him, he absorbed their DNA and unconsciously hid the fact that he wasn't theirs from them and himself. The entire process had been instinctive, having been hardwired into his genetic structure, as had the instinct to psychically bond with his parents whom he depended on for survival.

The Harrowgates named him Agustus Alexander.

**July 31, 1980:**

The Harrowgates were on their way to visit Richard's parents when the cloaked and masked figure who had been riding an honest to goodness broom had flown past the car. Wilhelmina who had been holding Agustus for whom they'd yet to get a carseat despite the fact that they'd had seven months' worth of advanced warning had nearly dropped her son in shock.

Three more such figures appeared and soon harried the car off the road and into a ditch.

With a sound like a pair of gunshots help had arrived, but it was far too late...

The Doctor who had been running towards the sound of screeching tires while Jamie trailed in his wake hurried his pace upon hearing what sounded like gunshots but carried the psychic impression of a rapid opening and closing of the space-time vortex in which the TARDIS traveled. All too soon, he found himself running down an embankment towards an overturned automobile which was merrily blazing away like a bonfire while a red-haired woman struggled to pull a bundle of some sort from it. A short distance away, a young man with messy black hair fought several masked and robed figures who hurled psychic attacks at him, hurling back the same in kind.

With a cry of "Creag an tuirc!" Jamie launched himself into battle, going to the dark-haired man's aid. Quite likely because the masked and cloaked figures looked rather sinister, and that type were usually up to no good in such situations. As Jamie joined the fight, the Doctor made his way down to the burning car from which the red-haired woman who was little more than a girl, younger than Jamie even, had pulled a small whimpering bundle which she cradled in her arms.

Examining the baby who seemed to be dying despite the fact that it appeared miraculously uninjured, he quickly realized what had happened even though something seemed to be fighting him the entire way. Something that kept weakly insisting that the baby that the red-haired girl was holding was an ordinary child, each protest of normalcy growing weaker and fainter than the last.

"It's no use." he said. "He psychically bonded himself to his adoptive parents, and the bond was broken far too soon. The backlash from it is killing him."

The girl who was on the verge of tears looked down at the small brown-haired newborn resolutely, much the way Jamie did when he encountered something he wouldn't stand for.

"I-If, if he could bond himself to someone else..." the girl said hesitantly.

"Even if it could work, there's no time." the Doctor replied, guessing at her plan. "Your husband is still busy fighting, as is Jamie."

Pulling a knife out of her sleeve, the red-haired girl cut open her palm and that of the infant.

"In Magic, Flesh, Blood, and Bone, I adopt you as my own." the girl said as she pressed her bleeding hand against that of the infant. There was a bright flash and both her hand and the baby's were healed.

"Would you let a baby die right in front of you if you could do something to help?" the girl asked as she handed him the knife.

Realizing that the answer to the question was "No", he followed the pattern of the ritual which was apparently meant to psychically tie a new parent to a child and alter its genetics, much the way Tenza did following their arrival on the planet on which they would live. A second later, he pulled the girl away as the baby began to glow with a bright golden light.

"_Oh dear_" he said as the baby Regenerated.


	2. The MacGuffin

When one pictures the Defeater of Voldemort, one would more than likely picture someone like Neville Longbottom who had become hardened and battle-scarred in the year leading up to the Battle of Hogwarts as he had protected those amongst the student population who'd fallen out of the favor of Voldemort's enforcers in the castle, not the little shrimp who looked like he was about six or seven and barely came up to Neville's waist. Harry James Potter, recipient of an Order of Merlin First Class and suspected half-breed had been the defeater of Voldemort however, and after he'd defeated Voldemort he'd retreated to the small cottage in the Scottish Highlands which had been left to him by a childless wizard named McCrimmon and did what he did best, tinkering.

The Tenth (technically eleventh) incarnation of the Doctor once joked that his Fifth self could save the universe with "a kettle and a bit of string". The Second incarnation of the Doctor could do it without the kettle. He may have been absolute pants at dealing with logic and numbers when compared to Zoe Heriot and some of his later selves, but if you handed him a space heater and a pile of junk, he could build you a working raygun and then drive off in the rest of the junk while you weren't looking.

It had been the Second Doctor who had adopted Harry in a ritual that gave him half his DNA, and the Second Doctor whom Harry had inherited most of his skills from. Skills that had puzzled the hell out of the people who had administered Harry's last seven I.Q. tests before he went off to Hogwarts since his results were merely average for his age, and the boy didn't appear to be gaming them like some geniuses had a tendency to do.

Sighing and pulling himself out from under the car he was currently restoring, Harry went to the kitchen to make himself lunch in the middle of the afternoon on the twenty-third day after Voldemort's defeat. Food didn't hold the appeal for him it did most others since he was nine, after his aunt Petunia had realized that he'd stopped growing a year or two earlier, figured that it had to do with his usual feeding schedule or lack of one, and started stuffing him full of food until he was sick out of fear that the authorities would realize that she and his uncle Vernon had been mistreating him. He had a few favorite foods that he enjoyed indulging in on occasion, but to him, eating had mostly become something to do to shut his stomach up.

He didn't know why his growth had come to a virtual standstill when he was about seven or eight, but sometimes when he closed his eyes, he dreamed that when he was about that age he'd once seen Everything. The dream that was filled with whispers of "Below average" and "It figures that the Doctor would do something like this completely by accident" was not a pleasant dream, nor were the shadowy half-remembered people in it. Half-remembered people who had seemed to take pleasure in prodding him with sticks as they herded him towards something. Up until Hogwarts, the only dreams he had that were worse than that one was the one where his mother died, and the one with the burning car.

Pushing his dark musings aside as he entered his cottage's small kitchen, he found himself jumping and diving under the table without fully processing why until a second later when he caught a glimpse of a grey cloak. His wand was in his hand before the shadowed face appeared in his line of sight when the figure who had been standing in his kitchen bent down to peer under the table.

"And people wonder why those who know you doubt your courage despite the deeds that prove your bravery." the stranger with the androgynous voice said as it sat down and showed that its hands were empty. "It is a pity that survival instinct is all too often mistaken for cowardice, child."

"I'm not a child!" Harry snapped, his small size and youthful appearance having been a sore point for the last several years, especially with all the girls his age and even some of the girls in the years below him treating him like he was their little brother or something. Not that he was interested, but still...

"As you may have seen during your rather...destructive tour of the facility, not all of the mysteries my department studies are of this Earth. Amongst your father's species you are still very much a child. Eight is near infancy, eighty is a mere youth, and a hundred and twenty is basically the new eighteen." the figure said, sounding amused.

"What do you want?" Harry asked, unhappy with the Unspeakable's confirmation of the fact that he was going to outlive his friends as he'd begun to suspect when he realized that he was still growing a little.

"There is something that needs to be kept out of Voldemort's hands because it was kept out of Voldemort's hands, and we need you to do it." the Unspeakable replied.

"I'd say that what you said doesn't make a lick of sense, but something similar happened to me during Third Year. The question I have is why do you need me?" Harry asked, having parsed the Unspeakable's statement and figured that it involved time travel. Since he'd thought that he was done with the whole Voldemort thing after he'd gone and fulfilled that prophesy, he was none too happy with this development.

"The dangers of apparating beyond a certain distance also apply for any time travel that is beyond a week or so. You however, being what you are, are protected." the Unspeakable replied. "That, and you were seen."

"And if I don't do it?" Harry asked, wanting to stay home, fix a few things, build a few more, and maybe go out with his friends into the Muggle world where he wouldn't be immediately mobbed on occasion. He'd had enough of adventure for the time being and wanted to finally let a bit of boredom set in before he went out and found an adventure that was more to his liking than the last several he'd been on.

The only thing that had allowed him to survive thus far was a little bit of speed and dexterity and a whole lot of luck. If he hadn't run back through that chess set and back again at the first sign of trouble from Quirrel, or run the Basilisk into a knot around that pillar, or run into himself coming and going, or any other number of things, he'd be dead several times over by now.

"If you don't do it, aside from the potentially world-ending paradox, there's the fact that Voldemort will get his hands on a powerful artifact which can cause an incalculable amount of damage nearly a decade before his first defeat." the Unspeakable said, pulling him out of his dark musings on what for him had been something of a seven-year war against Voldemort.

"Fine." Harry sighed, knowing that once again there had been no choice. For him, it was quite possible that the war with Voldemort would never end.

"The world thanks you Harry." the Unspeakable said not unkindly.

"Just let me get ready first. I've got to pack, and I've got a letter which will need to be sent to my friends after I leave to write." Harry said as he scooted out from under the table.

"Why don't you just tell your friends?" the Unspeakable asked.

"Because they'd try to go with me if I did." Harry said. "They'd follow me to the very gates of Hell, heck they'd follow me into Hell if I so much as mentioned wanting to bother Voldemort in the afterlife for the fun of it."

"I see." the Unspeakable said, sounding rather amused. "Your father tends to gather such friends to him himself."

Scowling at the mention of the man or whatever he was who had broken James Potter's trust, Harry turned towards his room to grab a few things he thought he might need. Even if the Unspeakable hadn't mentioned the world-ending paradox or the possibility of Voldemort winning, he might've gone anyways in order to keep the artifact he was being sent after out of the wrong hands. He'd had that "Saving people thing" since even before he'd been - unknown to himself - adopted by the Doctor. The reason he'd chosen the Harrowgates after all had been because when he'd landed, Wilhelmena who hadn't gotten over the loss of her only son a year earlier had been reaching for a bottle of sleeping pills.

"A meteor rock?!" Harry exclaimed as he stood in a ritual circle in the bowels of the Department of Mysteries two days later while the Unspeakables gave him some last-minute instructions. "I'm looking for a meteor rock?!"


	3. Coulda Smacked Him With a Trout

"Come on Bessie, I know you can be more cooperative than that." The Doctor said as he worked on a modification to the frame of the antique on wheels which would enable the vehicle which was never meant to travel at more than thirty miles an hour to handily survive sustained travel at over ninety, even in rough conditions. The yellow roadster, being non-sentient, made no reply, though it almost seemed as if the repair work became more difficult after that out of a perverse desire on the part of the vehicle to screw with the Doctor who'd modified it so many times that about the only thing that was original to the car was the horn and maybe the headlights, and even those were questionable.

Outside of the garage where the Doctor was tinkering with one of the conditions of his employment, everyone was getting on with the work they generally did when not engaged in battles with aliens, mutated monsters, lizard people from the dawn of time, and corporations bent on world conquest i.e. preparing for the latest peace conference, doing intelligence work that had more to do with Soviet Russia than outer-space, trying to figure out why almost nobody remembered the Mars landings despite the fact that they had taken place less than a year before, and trying to figure out why the hell the Cold War was back on again when they'd been pretty damn sure it was off and had already made some statements to that effect which now made them look rather stupid.

All in all, it seemed to be shaping up into being one of those all-too-frequent ordinary days where everyone either tried to enjoy the silence while it lasted or went around with the air of one who was waiting for the other shoe to drop, flinching at every loud noise and examining strangers a little more carefully in case they might be the Master in a mask dropping by to cause trouble for the Doctor and raid the canteen while he was at it just because he could. Considering how often the felonious Time Lord's insane Earth-based plots had failed and how Jo had mentioned that the Master's worst fear seemed to be a maniacally laughing Doctor, rumor was going around that the Master wasn't so much bent on World Conquest as on keeping the Doctor busy so he didn't take a dive off the deep end, which was part of the reason the Master kept escaping U.N.I.T. custody alive.

The main part of the reason the Master escaped so handily was that he was actually that smart, but there were those who were somewhat hesitant to start shooting out of fear of what the Doctor's reaction might be. The Doctor was helping for now, but those who had unexpectedly run headfirst into the fact that the Doctor wasn't human be it through witnessing an act of inhuman strength or speed or through a moment of utter incomprehension on one or both parts knew that could change in the blink of an eye since the only loyalties he had to the human species were in the ties he created. That was also part of the reason Sergeant Benton and Captain Yates dealt with him so often, since he seemed to get along with them better than most of the other soldiers who'd been run through his lab.

As a young Private who'd been loaned to U.N.I.T. whose official function had something to do with international events hosted by the United Nations and the providing of security thereof and whose off the books purview had more to do with anything weird including witches ruefully noted that the day was a perfect one for a game of football, there was a bright light, a window shattering bang, and a small exclamation of "I'm never doing that again! That was worse than when I apparated to Switzerland last week.". When the spots cleared from the eyes of the Private who'd been doing sentry duty, he saw a small messy-haired boy in turn-of-the-century clothing who was holding an old-fashioned rucksack. The boy looked up at him looking down at him, looked slightly embarrassed when he realized that the Private was staring more at his outlandish outfit than anything else, gestured to his clothing and said "To be honest, I thought I would be landing _elsewhere _where this was still fashionable, seeing as _They _told me they'd be sending me somewhere I could get help, and the help I need...".

Having been informed that any strange happenings that occurred in front of him were above his pay-grade unless ordered otherwise, the Private mentally scrabbled to find which department he should report this incident to, seeing as such things usually fell to one of U.N.I.T.'s two special advisors to deal with, with or without the help of U.N.I.T.'s military might. A human child appearing out of nowhere appeared to be something that should be delivered to the door with a broom on it that most definitely wasn't a broom cupboard, but then again, it could be another alien incursion that had taken a seemingly innocuous form. Before the Private could make the decision regarding which section of the ladder to kick this pint-sized problem up to, both the Doctor and the chap that nobody was supposed to talk about came running.

Despite being in excellent shape, the chap that nobody was supposed to talk about trailed after the grease stained Doctor who was still wearing a blue overall rather than his usual frilly attire by a wide margin. That was until the Doctor caught sight of the boy who was standing in front of the Private, and abruptly froze in place with an expression on his face that was akin to one a man might wear if somebody suddenly dumped a load of Salmon on his desk and asked him to make Cheeseburgers. While he just stood there, the chap that nobody was supposed to talk about caught up to him, overtook him, and passed him, only stopping when he reached the boy who was standing in front of the Private. Muttering a few words in a language that seemed to be a bastardized form of Latin, the chap that nobody was supposed to talk about tapped the boy on the head with a stick that the Private pretended not to notice, it being above his pay-grade and all.

"Damn, and I thought I'd actually get a case today." the chap that nobody was supposed to talk about who was also known as U.N.I.T.'s Magical Advisor and known to his friends as Richard Wainright and to his enemies as "That damn Muggleborn" muttered. "The Doctor will be the one seeing action while I sit languishing in my office sorting out Diagon Alley chatter looking for signs of 'troublesome elements' yet again."

Turning away from the small boy in short trousers, U.N.I.T.'s Magical Advisor passed the Doctor who was standing there looking slightly like a landed fish a second time on his way back into the building to return to the job that was his bread and butter and would be called Anti-Terrorist Operations (Magical) in a future generation when funding increased and it jumped to a higher pay scale. Basically what he was doing was searching audio from a number of discreetly placed monitoring spells for certain key words that might indicate trouble that could spill into the Muggle world and cause the sort of problems nobody needed, least of all U.N.I.T. which was also tasked with helping keep the hidden Magical world just that, hidden.

Finally, whatever it was that had caused the Doctor's brain to hit the Blue Screen of Death slowly cleared and the Doctor moved forward looking as if he were cautiously approaching a landmine. Strangely, as he watched the Doctor approach the boy, the Private was reminded of the time his brother had found out that his girlfriend was pregnant. The boy watched the Doctor approach, looking as if he wasn't quite sure what the man's problem was, but was willing to accommodate the crazy person for now since he didn't have anything better to do at the moment.

Eventually, the Doctor reached the small boy and knelt down until he was level with him the way one would when approaching a cat or a particularly skittish dog. Rather than extending a hand for the boy to sniff as one would had the boy been a domesticated animal commonly kept as a pet, the Doctor reached a hand out, slowly put it on the boy's shoulder, pulled him forward towards him, and then lightly sniffed the boy's hair.

"Definitely mine." the Doctor muttered as he held the boy who looked like he was about to bolt in place. "The predominant scent is _His_, but definitely mine."

Figuring that there were probably elements to Time Lord reproduction that he most definitely didn't want to know about, the Private did his best to erase that last statement from his memory and focus on the fact that what appeared to be the Doctor's son had turned up on U.N.I.T.'s doorstep, which would be gossip for the ages. As far as the Private was concerned, the fact that the kid had black hair was just a coincidence, and it was going to stay that way no matter which paths his mind tried to rove down as the word "Master" futilely tried to pop up.

After several failed escape attempts, the boy seemed to realize that resistance was futile and that the Doctor who was slotting the existence of his son into his world wasn't going to let go any time soon.

"You wouldn't happen to know anything about meteor rocks would you?" the boy asked as the Doctor picked him up and carried him back towards the building and presumably the lab he seemed to have claimed as both his workspace and his private residence.

* * *

**Author's Note: **Before anyone comments, despite the conclusion that the Private skydove to to hopefully humorous effect, I wasn't actually suggesting that Harry was the Doctor and the Master's son. The "His" in this case is the Second Doctor, working on the theory that while the Doctor would have a common base scent that identified him, each Doctor would have an individual overscent that carried the base scent as well as certain identifying information. As the Doctor's "offspring" due to the rather unusual adoption, the Second Doctor's scent became part of Harry's base scent which would carry familial information that the Doctor could identify much the way that the 11th Doctor was able to tell that River was Amy's child just by smelling them.


End file.
